ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the conflicted vision of Romanticism which twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets inherit. It starts by discussing how, in the context of contemporary poetry and its criticism, the Romantic has come to be equated all too readily with escapism and solipsism. The chapter traces this development from the debates inspired by new historicist studies such as Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) to recent critiques of the Romantic lyric as a genre. In a second step, a brief survey of works by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare counteracts the perceived norm of Romantic escapism and egocentricity. As Romantic poets sceptically question the transcendent power of their own subjective vision and strive to find aesthetic forms that mediate particularities of landscape and locality, they offer productive points of departure for contemporary feminist, ecopoetic, and devolutionary models of subjectivity and alterity. The chapter closes by outlining an approach to literary influence apposite to the works of Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie, arguing that the post-Romantic quality of contemporary poetry must be thought of as multilayered and dynamic, comprising acts of rejection as well as continuation.
